Character Entities

Character entities are a method of including arbitrary characters in XML documents by referencing their UNICODE number rather than writing them directly. CSS has a similar mechanism to include special characters.

This can be convenient when you wish to include characters such as smart quotes, symbols or mathematical operators that do not exist in the character encoding that you are using for your XML documents (such as ASCII or ISO-8859-1 "Latin-1"), or when you want to insert some of these characters into the final layout by means of CSS.

Here is an example of including smart quotes in an XML document using character entities:

<p>
These are &#x201C;smart quotes&#x201D; to be precise.
</p>

A typical usecase for CSS is the prince-text-replace property, which replaces a certain character string with another one. In the sample "Reconstructed Essay" (HTML - PDF), the property is used to replace occurrences of "s" with the "long s" to recreate the original printed book.

body {
  prince-text-replace: "s" "\017F";
}

The tables below are a quick reference for some commonly requested UNICODE characters, expressed in XML and CSS notation; for everything else please consult the UNICODE code charts.